XLI
Hyacinth waited a long time, but when at last Millicent came to the door the splendour of her appearance did much to justify her delay. He heard an immense rustling on the staircase, accompanied by a creaking of that inexpensive structure, and then she brushed forward into the narrow, dusky passage where he had been standing a quarter of an hour. Highly flushed, she exhaled a strong, cheap perfume, and she instantly thrust her muff, a tight, fat, beribboned receptacle, at him to be held while she adjusted her gloves to her large, vulgar hands. He opened the door—it was so natural an assumption that they shouldn’t be able to talk properly in the passage—and they came out to the low steps, lingering there in the yellow Sunday sunshine. A loud ejaculation on the beauty of the day broke from Millicent, though, as we know, she was not addicted to facile admirations. Winter was not over but spring had begun, and the smoky London air allowed the baffled vision, by way of a change, to pierce it almost through. The town could refresh its recollections of the sky, and the sky could ascertain the geographical position of the town. The essential dimness of the low perspectives had by no means disappeared, but it had loosened its folds; it lingered as a blur of mist interwoven with pretty sun-tints and faint transparencies. There was warmth and iridescence and a view of the shutters of shops, and the church-bells were ringing. Miss Henning remarked that it was a “shime” she couldn’t have a place to ask a gentleman to sit down; but what were you to do when you had such a grind for your living and a room, to keep yourself tidy, no bigger than a pill-box? She couldn’t herself abide waiting outside; she knew something about it when she took things home to ladies to choose—the time they spent was long enough to choose a husband!—and it always made her feel quite wicked. It was something “croo’l.” If she could have what she liked she knew what she’d have; and she hinted at a mystic bower where a visitor could sit and enjoy himself—with the morning paper or a nice view out of the window or even a glass of sherry—so that, close at hand but perfectly private, she could dress without getting in a fidget, which always made her red in the face.
“I don’t know how I ’ave pitched on my things,” she remarked as she offered her magnificence to Hyacinth, who became aware she had put a small plump book into her muff. He explained that, the day being so fine, he had come to propose to her a walk in the manner of ancient times. They might spend an hour or two in the Park and stroll beside the Serpentine, or even paddle about on it if she liked; they might watch the lambkins or feed the ducks if she would put a crust in her pocket. The privilege of paddling Millicent entirely declined; she had no idea of wetting her flounces and she left those rough pleasures, especially of a Sunday, to a lower class of young woman. But she didn’t mind if she did go a turn, though he didn’t deserve any such favour after the way he hadn’t been near her, not if she had died in her garret. She wasn’t one that was to be dropped and taken up at any man’s convenience—she didn’t keep one of those offices for servants out of place. Her conviction was strong that if the day hadn’t been so grand she would have sent her friend about his business; it was lucky for him she was always forgiving—such was her sensitive, generous nature—when the sun was out. Only there was one thing—she couldn’t abide making no difference for Sunday; it was her personal habit to go to church and she should have it on her conscience if she gave that up for a lark. Hyacinth had already been impressed, more than once, by the manner in which his old playmate stickled for the religious observance: of all the queer disparities of her nature her devotional turn struck him as perhaps the queerest. She held her head erect through the longest and dullest sermon and quitted the sacred edifice with her fine face embellished by the publicity of her virtue. She was exasperated by the general secularity of Hyacinth’s behaviour, especially taken in conjunction with his general straightness, and was only consoled a little by the fact that if he didn’t drink or fight or steal he at least dabbled in unlimited wickedness of opinion—theories as bad as anything people often got ten years for. He had not yet revealed to her that his theories had somehow lately come to be held with less of a clutch; an instinct of kindness had forbidden him to deprive her of a grievance doing so much for sociability. He had not reflected that she would have been more aggrieved, and consequently more delightful, if her condemnation of his godlessness had missed corroborative signs.
On the present occasion she let him know he might have his pleasure if he would first accompany her to church; and it was in vain he represented to her that this proceeding would deprive them of their morning, inasmuch as after church she would have to dine and in the interval there would be no time left. She replied with a toss of her head that she dined when she liked; besides, on Sundays she had cold fare—it was left out for her: an argument to which Hyacinth had to assent, his ignorance of her domestic economy being complete, thanks to the maidenly mystery, the vagueness of reference and explanation in which, despite great freedom of complaint, perpetual announcements of intended change, of impending promotion and of high bids for her services in other quarters, she had always enshrouded her private affairs. He walked by her side to the place of worship she preferred—her choice was made apparently from a large experience; and as they went he observed that it was a good job he wasn’t married to her. Lord, how she would bully him, how she would “squeeze” him, in such a case! The worst of it would be that—such was his amiable, peace-loving nature—he should obey like a showman’s poodle. And pray who was a man to obey, asked Millicent, if he wasn’t to obey his own wife? She sat up in her pew with a majesty that carried out this idea; she seemed to answer in her proper person for creeds and communions and sacraments; she was more than devotional, she was individually almost pontifical. Hyacinth had never felt himself under such distinguished protection; the Princess Casamassima came back to him in comparison as a loose Bohemian, a shabby adventuress. He had sought her out to-day not for the sake of her austerity—he had had too gloomy a week for that—but for that of her genial side; yet now that she treated him to the severer spectacle it struck him for the moment as really grand sport, a kind of magnification of her rich vitality. She had her phases and caprices like the Princess herself, and if they were not the same as those of the lady of Madeira Crescent they proved at least that she was as brave a woman. No one but a really big creature could give herself such airs; she would have a consciousness of the large reserve of pliancy required to make up for them. The Princess wanted to destroy society and Millicent to uphold it; and as Hyacinth, by the side of his childhood’s friend, listened to practised intonings and felt the brush of a rich unction, he was obliged to recognise the liberality of a fate that had sometimes appeared invidious. He had been provided with the best opportunities for choosing between the beauty of the original and the beauty of the conventional.
On this particular Sunday there was by luck no sermon—by the luck, I mean, of his heretical impatience—so that after the congregation dispersed there was still plenty of time for a walk in the Park. Our friends traversed that barely-interrupted expanse of irrepressible herbage which stretches from the Birdcage Walk to Hyde Park Corner and took their way to Kensington Gardens beside the Serpentine. Once her religious exercises were over for the day—she as rigidly forbore to repeat them in the afternoon as she made a point of the first service—once she had lifted her voice in prayer and praise Millicent changed her carriage; moving to a different measure, uttering her sentiments in a high, free manner and not minding if it was noticed she had on her very best gown and was out if need be for the day. She was mainly engaged at first in overhauling Hyacinth for his long absence and demanding as usual some account of what he had been up to. He listened at his ease, liking and enjoying her chaff, which seemed to him, oddly enough, wholesome and refreshing, and amusedly and absolutely declining to satisfy her. He alleged, as he had had occasion to do before, that if he asked no explanations of her the least he had a right to expect in return was that she should let him off as easily; and even the indignation with which she received this plea didn’t make him feel that a clearing-up between them could be a serious thing. There was nothing to clear up and nothing to forgive; they were a pair of very fallible creatures, united much more by their weaknesses than by any consistency or fidelity they might pretend to practise toward each other. It was an old acquaintance—the oldest thing to-day, except Mr. Vetch’s friendship, in Hyacinth’s life; and, oddly enough, it inspired our young man with a positive indulgent piety. The probability that the girl “kept company” with other men had quite ceased to torment his imagination; it was no longer necessary to his happiness to be so certain about it that he might dismiss her from his mind. He could be as happy without it as with it, and he felt a new modesty over prying into her affairs. He was so little in a position to be stern with her that her assumption of his recognising a right in her to pull him to pieces seemed but a part of her perpetual clumsiness—a clumsiness that was not soothing, yet was nevertheless, in its rich spontaneity, one of the things he liked her for.
“If you’ve come to see me only to make low jokes at my expense you had better have stayed away altogether,” she said with dignity as they came out of the Green Park. “In the first place it’s rude, in the second place it’s silly, and in the third place I see through you.”
“My dear Milly, the motions you go through, the resentment you profess, are all a kicking up of dust which I blow away with a breath,” her companion replied. “But it doesn’t matter; go on—say anything you like. I came to see you for recreation, to enjoy myself without effort of my own. I scarcely ventured to hope, however, that you’d make me laugh—I’ve been so dismal for a long time. In fact I’m dismal still. I wish I had your disposition. My mirth, as you see, is a bit feverish.”
“The first thing I require of any friend is that he should respect me,” Miss Henning announced. “You lead a bad life. I know what to think about that,” she continued irrelevantly.
“And is it through respect for you that you wish me to lead a better one? To-day then is so much saved out of my wickedness. Let us get on the grass,” Hyacinth pursued; “it’s innocent and pastoral to feel it under one’s feet. It’s jolly to be with you. You understand everything.”
“I don’t understand everything you say, but I understand everything you hide,” the young woman returned as the great central expanse of the Park, looking intensely green and browsable, stretched away before them.
“Then I shall soon become a mystery to you, for I mean from this time forth to cease to seek safety in concealment. You’ll know nothing about me then—for it will be all under your nose.”
“Well, there’s nothing so pretty as nature,” Millicent observed at a venture, surveying the smutty sheep who find pasturage in the fields that extend from Knightsbridge to the Bayswater Road. “What will you do when you’re so bad you can’t go to the shop?” she added with a sudden transition. And when he asked why he should ever be so bad as that she said she could see he was in a fever: she hadn’t noticed it at first because he never had had any more complexion than a cheese. Was it something he had caught in some of those back slums where he went prying about with his mad ideas? It served him right for taking as little good into such places as ever came out of them. Would his fine friends—a precious lot they were, that put it off on him to do all the nasty part—would they find the doctor and the port wine and the money and all the rest when he was laid up, perhaps for months, through their putting such rot into his head and his putting it into others that could carry it even less? She stopped on the grass in the watery sunshine and bent on her companion a pair of eyes in which he noted afresh a stirred curiosity, a friendly, reckless ray, a possibility of ardour, a pledge of really closer comradeship. Suddenly she brought out, quitting the tone of exaggerated derision she had employed a moment before: “You precious little rascal, you’ve got something on your heart! Has your Princess given you the sack?”
“My poor girl, your talk’s a queer mixture,” he resignedly sighed. “But it may well be. It’s not queerer than my life.”
“Well, I’m glad you admit that!” Milly cried as she walked on with a flutter of ribbons.
“Your ideas about my ideas!” Hyacinth wailed. “Yes, you should see me in the back slums. I’m a bigger Philistine than you, Miss Henning.”
“You’ve got more ridiculous names, if that’s what you mean. I don’t believe you half the time know what you do mean yourself. I don’t believe you even know with all your thinking what you do think. That’s your disease.”
“It’s astonishing how you sometimes put your finger on the place,” he now returned with interest. “I mean to think no more—I mean to give it up. Avoid it yourself, dear friend—avoid it as you would a baleful vice. It confers no true happiness. Let us live in the world of irreflective contemplation—let us live in the present hour.”
“I don’t care how I live nor where I live,” she cried, “so long as I can do as I like. It’s them that are over you—it’s them that cut it fine! But you never were really satisfactory to me—not as one friend should be to another,” she pursued, reverting irresistibly to the concrete and turning still upon her companion that fine fairness which had no cause to shrink from a daylight exhibition. “Do you remember that day I came back to the Plice, ever so long ago, and called on poor dear Miss Pynsent—she couldn’t abide me, she never understood my form—and waited till you came in, and then went a walk with you and had tea at a coffee-shop? Well, I don’t mind telling you that you weren’t satisfactory to me even that night, and that I consider myself remarkably good-natured, ever since, to have kept you so little up to the mark. You always tried to carry it off as if you were telling one everything, and you never told one nothing at all.”
“What is it you want me to tell, my dear child?” Hyacinth freely fluted, putting his hand into her arm. “I’ll tell you anything in life you like.”
“I daresay you’ll tell me no end of rot. Certainly I tried kindness on you,” Miss Henning declared.
“Try it again; don’t give it up,” said her friend while he moved with her in close association.
She stopped short, detaching herself, though not with intention. “Well then, has she clean chucked you?”
Hyacinth’s eyes turned away; he looked at the green expanse, misty and sunny, dotted with Sunday-keeping figures which made it seem larger; at the wooded boundary of the Park, beyond the grassy moat of the Gardens; at a shining reach of the Serpentine on the one side and the far façades of Bayswater, brightened by the fine weather and the privilege of their view, on the other. “Well, you know, I rather fancy it,” he replied in a moment.
“Ah the vile brute!” she rang out as they resumed their walk.
Upwards of an hour later they were sitting under the great trees of Kensington, those scattered, in the Gardens, over the slope which rises gently from the side of the water most distant from the old red palace. They had taken possession of a couple of the chairs placed there to the convenience of that superior part of the public for which a penny is not prohibitive, and Millicent, of whom such speculations were highly characteristic, had devoted considerable conjecture to the question of whether the functionary charged with collecting the penny would omit to come and demand his fee. Miss Henning liked to enjoy her pleasures gratis as well as to see others do so, and even that of sitting in a penny chair could touch her more deeply in proportion as she might feel she was “doing” some vested interest by it. The man came round, however, and after that her pleasure could only take the form of sitting as long as possible, to recover her money. This issue had been met, and two or three others of a much weightier kind had come up. At the moment we again participate in them she was leaning forward, earnest and attentive, her hands clasped in her lap and her multitudinous silver bracelets tumbled forward on her thick wrists. Her face, with its parted lips and eyes clouded to gentleness, wore an expression Hyacinth had never seen there before and which caused him to say to her: “After all, dear Milly, you’re a sweet old boy!”
“Why did you never tell me before—years ago?” she asked.
“It’s always soon enough to make a fool of one’s self! I don’t know why I’ve slobbered over to-day—sitting here in a charming place, in balmy air, amid pleasing suggestions and without any reason or practical end. The story’s hideous and I’ve kept it down so long! It would have been an effort to me, an impossible effort at any time, to do otherwise. Somehow, just now it hasn’t been an effort; and indeed I’ve spoken just because the air’s sweet and the place ornamental and the day a holiday and your person so lovely and your presence so moving. All this has had the effect an object has if you plunge it into a cup of water—the water overflows. Only in my case it’s not water, but a very foul liquid indeed. Pardon the bad odour!”
There had been a flush of excitement in Millicent’s face while she listened to what had gone before; it lingered, and as a fine colour still further refined by an access of sensibility is never unbecoming to a handsome woman it enriched her unwonted expression. “I wouldn’t have been so rough with you,” she presently remarked.
“My dear lass, this isn’t rough!” Hyacinth protested.
“You’re all of a tremble.” She put out her hand and laid it on his own as if she had been a nurse feeling his pulse.
“Very likely. I’m a nervous little beast,” he said.
“Any one would be nervous to think of anything so awful. And when it’s yourself!” The girl’s manner represented the dreadfulness of such a contingency. “You require sympathy,” she added in a tone that made him perversely grin; the words sounded like a medical prescription.
“A tablespoonful every half-hour.” And he kept her hand, which she was about to draw away.
“You’d have been nicer too,” Millicent went on.
“How do you mean, I’d have been nicer?”
“Well, I like you now,” said Miss Henning. And this time she drew away her hand as if, after such a speech, to recover her dignity.
“It’s a pity I’ve always been so terribly under the influence of women,” Hyacinth sighed again as he folded his arms.
He was surprised at the delicacy with which she replied. “You must remember they’ve a great deal to make up to you.”
“Do you mean for my mother? Ah she’d have made it up if they had let her! But the sex in general have been very nice to me,” he declared. “It’s wonderful the kindness they’ve shown me and the amount of pleasure I’ve derived from their society.”
It would perhaps be inquiring too closely to consider whether this reference to sources of consolation other than those that sprang from her own bosom had an irritating effect on Milly; she at all events answered it by presently saying: “Does she know—your trumpery Princess?”
“Yes, but she doesn’t mind it.”
“That’s most uncommonly kind of her!” cried the girl with a scornful laugh.
“It annoys me very much,” he interposed—though still with detachment—“to hear you apply invidious epithets to her. You know nothing about her.”
“How do you know what I know, please?” She asked this question with the habit of her natural pugnacity, but the next instant she dropped her voice as in remembrance of the appeal made by a great misfortune. “Hasn’t she treated you most shamefully, and you such a regular dear?”
“Not in the least. It is I who, as you may say, have rounded on her. She made my acquaintance because I was interested in the same things as herself. Her interest has continued, has increased, but mine, for some reason or other, has declined. She has been consistent and I’ve been beastly fickle.”
“Your interest in the Princess has declined?” Millicent questioned, following imperfectly this somewhat complicated statement.
“Oh dear, no. I mean only in some opinions I used to hold.” And he might have been speaking of “shaky” shares, to a considerable amount, of which he had at a given moment shrewdly directed his broker to relieve him.
“Ay, when you thought everything should go to the lowest! That’s a good job!”—and Miss Henning’s laugh suggested that, after all, Hyacinth’s views and the changes in his views were not what was most important. “And your grand lady still goes in for the costermongers?”
“She wants to take hold of the great question of material misery; she wants to do something to make that misery less. I don’t care for her means, I don’t like her processes. But when I think of what there is to be done, and of the courage and devotion of those who set themselves to do it, it seems to me sometimes that with my reserves and scruples I’m a very poor creature.”
“You are a poor creature—to sit there and put such accusations on yourself!” the girl flashed out. “If you haven’t a spirit for yourself I promise I’ve got one for you! If she hasn’t kicked you out why in the name of common sense did you say just now she has? And why is your dear old face as white as my stocking?”
Hyacinth looked at her a while without answering and as if he took a placid pleasure in her violence. “I don’t know—I don’t understand.”
She put out her own hand now and took possession of his; for a minute she held it as wishing to check herself, as finding some influence in his touch that would help her. They sat in silence, looking at the ornamental water and the landscape-gardening reflected in it, till Milly turned her eyes again and brought out: “Well, that’s the way I’d have served him too!”
It took him a moment to perceive she was alluding to the vengeance wrought on Lord Frederick. “Don’t speak of that; you’ll never again hear a word about it on my lips. It’s all darkness.”
“I always knew you were a gentleman,” the girl went on with assurance.
“A queer variety, cara mia,” her companion rejoined—not very candidly, as we know the theories he himself had cultivated on this point. “Of course you had heard poor Pinnie’s wild maunderings. They used to exasperate me when she was alive, but I forgive her now. It’s time I should, when I begin to talk myself. I think I’m breaking up.”
“Oh it wasn’t Miss Pynsent; it was just yourself.”
“Pray what did I ever say—in those days?”
“It wasn’t what you said,” she answered with refinement. “I guessed the whole business—except of course what she got her time for and you being taken to that death-bed—the very day I came back to the Plice. Couldn’t you see I was turning it over? And did I ever throw it up at you, whatever high words we might have had? Therefore what I say now is no more than I thought then. It only makes you nicer.”
She was crude, she was common, she even had the vice of pointless exaggeration, for he himself honestly couldn’t understand how the situation he had described could make him nicer. But when the faculty of affection that was in her rose to the surface it diffused a glow of rest, almost of protection, deepening at any rate the luxury of their small cheap pastoral, the interlude in the grind of the week’s work; so that though neither of them had dined he would have been delighted to sit with her there the whole afternoon. It seemed a pause in something harsh that was happening to him, making it all easier, pushing it off to a distance. His thoughts hovered about that with a pertinacity of which they themselves wearied, but they hung there now with an ache of indifference. It would be too much, no doubt, to say that Millicent’s society appeared a compensation, yet he felt it at least a resource. For her too, evidently, the time had a taste; she made no proposal to retrace their steps. She questioned him about his father’s family and as to their letting him go on like that without ever holding out so much as a little finger; and she declared in a manner that was meant to gratify him by the indignation it conveyed, though the awkwardness of the turn made him smile, that if she had been one of such a bloated crew she should never have been able to “abear” the thought of a relation in such a poor way. Hyacinth already knew what Miss Henning thought of his business at old Crook’s and of the feeble show of a young man of his parts contented with a career that was after all a mere getting of one’s living by one’s ’ands. He had to do with books, but so had any shop-boy who should carry such articles to the residence of purchasers; and plainly Millicent had never discovered wherein the art he practised differed from that of a plumber or a saddler. He had not forgotten the shock once administered to her by his letting her know he wore an apron; she looked down on such conditions from her own so much higher range, since she wore mantles and jackets and shawls and the long trains of robes exhibited behind plate glass on dummies of wire and drawn forth to be transferred to her own undulating person, and had moreover never a scrap to do with making them up, but just with talking about them and showing them off and persuading people—people too quite gaping with the impression—of their beauty and cheapness. It had been a source of endless comfort to her, in her arduous evolution, that she herself never worked with her ’ands. Hyacinth answered her inquiries, as she had answered his own of old, by asking her what “his family” owed to the son of a person who had brought murder and mourning into their bright sublimities, and whether she thought he was very highly recommended to them. His question pulled her up a moment; after which she returned with the finest spirit: “Well, if your position was so low ain’t that all the more reason they should give you a lift? Oh it’s something cruel!” she cried; and she added that in his place she would have found a way to bring herself under their notice. She wouldn’t have drudged out her life in Soho if she had had the blood of half the Peerage in her veins! “If they had noticed you they’d have liked you,” she was so good as to observe; but she immediately remembered also that in that case he would have been carried away quite over her head. She wasn’t prepared to say that she would have given him up, little good as she had ever got of him. In that case he would have been thick with real swells, and she emphasised the “real” by way of a thrust at the fine lady of Madeira Crescent—an artifice wasted, however, inasmuch as Hyacinth was sure she had extracted from Sholto a tolerably detailed history of the Princess. Millicent was tender and tenderly sportive, and he was struck with the fact that his base birth really made little impression on her: she accounted it an accident much less grave than he had been in the habit of doing. She was touched and moved, but what moved her was his story of his mother’s dreadful revenge, her long imprisonment and his childish visit to the jail, with his later discovery of his peculiar footing in the world. These things produced in her a generous agitation—something the same in kind as the emotion she had occasionally owed to the perusal of the Family Herald. What affected her most and what she came back to was the whole element of Lord Frederick and the mystery of Hyacinth’s having got so little good out of his affiliation to that nobleman. She couldn’t get over his friends’ not having done something, though her imagination was still vague as to what they might have done. It was the queerest thing in the world to find her apparently assuming that if he hadn’t been so inefficient he might have “worked” the whole dark episode as a source of distinction, of glory, of profit. She wouldn’t have been a nobleman’s daughter for nothing! Oh the left hand was as good as the right; her respectability, for the moment, made nothing of that! His long silence was what most astonished her; it put her out of patience, and there was a strange candour in her wonderment at his not having bragged about his ancestry. The generations representing it were vivid and concrete to her now in comparison with the timid shadows Pinnie had set into spasmodic circulation. Millicent bumped about in his hushed past with the oddest mixture of enthusiasm and criticism, and with good intentions which had the effect of profane voices bawling for sacred echoes.
“Me only—me and her? Certainly I ought to be obliged, even though it’s late in the day. The first time you saw her I suppose you told her—that night you went into her box at the theatre, eh? She’d have worse to tell you, I’m sure, if she could ever bring herself to speak the proper truth. And do you mean to say you never broke it to your big friend in the chemical line?”
“No, we’ve never talked about it.”
“Men are rare creatures!” Millicent cried. “You never so much as mentioned it?”
“It wasn’t necessary. He knew it otherwise—he knew it through his sister.”
“How do you know that if he never spoke?”
“Oh because he was jolly good to me,” said Hyacinth.
“Well, I don’t suppose that ruined him,” Miss Henning rejoined. “And how did his sister know it?”
“Oh I don’t know. She guessed it.”
The girl stared, then fairly snorted. “It was none of her business.” Then she added: “He was jolly good to you? Ain’t he good to you now?” She asked this question in her loud free voice, which rang through the bright stillness of the place.
Hyacinth delayed for a minute to meet it, and when at last he did so it was without looking at her. “I don’t know. I can’t make it out.”
“Well, I can then!” And she jerked him round toward her and inspected him with her big bright eyes. “You silly baby, has he been serving you?” She pressed her curiosity upon him; she asked if that was what disagreed with him. His lips gave her no answer, but apparently after an instant she found one in his face. “Has he been making up to her Serene Highness—is that his game?” she broke out. “Do you mean to say she’d look at the likes of him?”
“The likes of him? He’s as fine a man as stands!” said Hyacinth. “They’ve the same views, they’re doing the same work.”
“Oh he hasn’t changed his opinions then—not like you?”
“No, he knows what he wants; he knows what he thinks.”
“Very much the ‘same work,’ I’ll be bound!” cried Millicent in large derision. “He knows what he wants, and I daresay he’ll get it.”
He was now on his feet, turning away from her; but she also rose and passed her hand into his arm. “It’s their own business; they can do as they please.”
“Oh don’t try to be a blamed saint; you put me out of patience!” the girl responded with characteristic energy. “They’re a precious pair, and it would do me good to hear you say so.”
“A man shouldn’t turn against his friends,” he went on with desperate sententiousness.
“That’s for them to remember; there’s no danger of your forgetting it.” They had begun to walk but she stopped him; she was suddenly smiling at him and her face was radiant. She went on with caressing inconsequence: “All you’ve terribly told me—it has made you nicer.”
“I don’t see that, but it has certainly made you so. My dear girl, you’re a comfort,” Hyacinth added as they moved further. Soon after which, the protection offered by the bole of a great tree being sufficiently convenient, he had, on a large look about them, passed his arm round her and drawn her closer and closer—so close that as they again paused together he felt her yield with a fine firmness, as it were, and with the full mass of her interest.